What Is At Coordinate 0,0 On Earth?

Have you ever wondered what is at co-ordinate 0° latitude and 0° longitude? Or how these co-ordinates were set in the first place? Well, wonder no more as we take a look.

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Prior to the agreement on a coordinate system, navigation was a bit of a mess. It was still possible, of course, but countries disagreed where the "Prime Meridian" – the point at which the longitude is set at 0° – should be. France published maps with the prime meridian going through Paris, while China created maps with 0° going through Beijing, something of a nightmare for anyone wishing to navigate their way across the world. In short, most countries agreed/insisted that the Prime Meridian should run through their own country, setting it at a convenient (for them) 0°.

At the International Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884, called by US President Chester Arthur, astronomers and representatives from 25 countries set about deciding on a universal Prime Meridian, putting an end to the confusion. At the conference, it was noted how convenient it was to use the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London as the Prime Meridian, where the international date line was to be set, as it passed almost entirely over water. 

That now marks zero degrees longitude, the line running from the top of the planet to the bottom, separating east from west. 0 degrees latitude was somewhat less controversial to set (though harder to figure out, requiring a lot of astronomy), with it being the line around the equator.

So, what is at coordinate 0,0? As mentioned above, the Prime Meridian mainly runs through water. The coordinate 0,0 also runs through water, specifically the Gulf of Guinea, just off the west coast of Africa in the eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean. But there is something there to mark it, and on digital maps, it's home to "Null Island". 

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When digitizing maps using a geographic information system (GIS), address data is converted into coordinates. This is a fairly simple, if time-consuming, process. But if the data goes wrong, it leaves you with an unfortunate error in the form of an island.

"Unfortunately, due to human typos, messy data, or even glitches in the geocoder itself, the geocoding process doesn’t always run so smoothly," Tim St. Onge explains in a Library of Congress blog post. "Misspelled street names, non-existent building numbers, and other quirks can create invalid addresses that can confuse a geocoder so that the output becomes '0,0'. While this output indicates that an error occurred, since '0,0' is in fact a location on the Earth’s surface according to the coordinate system, the feature will be mapped there, as nonsensical as the location may be. We end up with an island of misfit data."

At some point, this area jokingly became known as "Null Island", brought to the attention of the public after volunteer geographers at Natural Earth manually drew the island onto their public domain map.

“[Null Island] is a fictional, 1-meter-square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross," according to Natural Earth. "Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude), it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services.”

While there is not much there in the non-digital world, it is home to a lone buoy known as Station 13010 - Soul. This and 16 other buoys make up the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Atlantic (PIRATA) system, which monitors factors like the temperature, humidity, and wind speed, informing weather forecasts and climate models. Not a bad job for a buoy with the most desirable coordinates on the planet.